August 3rd A work day with sides of Irma Hotel and the Cody Nightly Rodeo

Leon cooked up a great breakfast of eggs, bacon and english muffins in the morning as we were not in too much of a hurry because today was a "work day" for us. Meaning we ran errands in town for the better part of the day. The most important being we finally got around to replacing the trailer batteries. Since I have not whined about it on the blog here is our sad story: As many folks know (if you've read our earlier blog posts) we installed solar panels before we started our trip because we planned to mostly dry camp in order to reduce campground costs and we didn't want to lug our Honda 2000ie generator along with us. Here's the good news, the solar system works fantastic! Here's the bad news, I told Leon before our trip that I had purchased glass mat batteries for our camper a few years ago from the company that did her restoration and come to find out they are gel batteries, not glass mat. We checked them early on during the trip because the batteries were not holding a charge overnight which means we could not run too many lights or the TV, water pump and Leon's C-Pap without the inverter screaming that it was low on power. To my dismay my memory was incorrect, once we discovered we had gel batteries it all came back to me. No glass mat, just gel. And 4+ year old gel batteries to boot which means they were at the end of their life cycle. We ended up just purchasing 12 volt deep cell marine / rv batteries as an interim solution as we want to do the research before we spend the big bucks on glass mat. Lets hope our new batteries make all the difference. In between errands we enjoyed lunch at the historic Irma Hotel in Cody, built by Buffalo Bill Cody (well, I'm sure he had people) and we're currently parked in a bar at a Mexican restaurant where the margaritas are on special for 2 bucks and draft beer is a buck - did I mention that I LOVE Wyoming?! We are heading to the Cody Nightly Rodeo as soon as I finish my third drink. I'll post pictures later.....

Here's our Cody Nightly Rodeo update: We arrived at the Rodeo just a few minutes before it's scheduled start and the first thing we noticed was the smell, it was over powering! Once inside we found plenty of available bleacher seating so we sat near the middle of the arena to insure we wouldn't miss a thing. First on the schedule was a parade of little and teenage girls dressed in red, white and blue on horseback carrying the American flag. They rode around the arena as patriotic music blared in the background. The little ones were very cute and seemed to be proud of their job. After the opening there was a lot of riding, roping, bucking bronco and steer riding going on. All of this stuff is hard to do and for the most part the cowboys and cowgirls made it look pretty easy. Something that surprised me, the folks performing in the rodeo are not paid, they actually pay the rodeo to compete! So I'm thinking the rodeo makes some major $$$ between the riders and the visitors. All in all a fun evening and now I can check "going to a rodeo" off of my life list. :-)